The Life Aquatic

I've been cleaning, testing, balancing the pH, chlorinating and vacuuming the blessed pool for about two weeks now.

The pool is, it cannot be denied, a massive pain in the wotsit. It requires constant attantion or something goes wrong. Leave it for a couple of days and the leaf strainer will clog with the would-be offspring of the young maple that provides that bucolic swimming-hole ambience, the floor will become littered with all sorts of crap, the water will turn cloudy (not had that one for a while: we're due), or my personal favourite: the ground fault protection will flare into protect mode necessitating a trip to the basement to reset it. Sometimes it must be entered to retrieve dropped components (such as the lid off the leaf skimmer) and no account can be taken of the low temperature the water attains for all but two months. It is all very irksome. Lots of work for no personal payoff, inasmuch as I rarely get the opportunity to use the damn thing when I am at home. All that work, just so the Stevieling and her pals could mess about on a bunch of inflatables while dad gets relegated to whatever job needs doing around the house.

It was not to be born. Action was called for, and I decided that it was time to try the water out by actually entering it last night.

The night was hot and muggy, a foretaste of things to come in the dog days of August. I badly needed to shed some heat on account of my manly layers of fat keep it in rather too well and I was about to pass out. So I lowered the ladder¹ and took the plunge, letting out a brief (but falsetto) scream as the soles of my feet registered the water temperature.

When I recovered consciousness a few seconds later I discovered that I could cut glass with my nipples, my skin had turned blue and my "lads" were residing somewhere just under my diaphragm. I immediately diagnosed that the water was still a little cool for comfortable bathing and clawed my way back up the ladder to the blessed heat of the air, vowing to put the solar cover on the pool tomorrow.

So much for swimming.

1. At the end of the season before last, I got fed up with how the Pool Robot of Extreme Uselessness kept wrapping itsef around the old "stepladder" style ladder, and I replaced it with a small deck with a ladder that can be swung up out of the water and locked into a horizontal position. Against all expectation, the idea has proved extremely workable, apart from the so-called "brass" hinges theat Home Despot sold me going rusty. So much for the vaunted "Stanley Pledge of Quality" ↑